期刊名称：International Journal of New Computer Architectures and their Applications
印刷版ISSN：2220-9085
出版年度：2013
卷号：3
期号：1
页码：86-119
出版社：Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications
摘要：Biologically inspired swarms of autonomous robots have been used successfully in a vari- ety of robotic applications ranging from var- ious kinds of ground-based robots, to un- manned aerial vehicles. Typically, all of these systems use digital communications among swarm agents to implement their behavioral rules (e.g., because they need to exchange in- formation about the location of agents). In this paper, we propose a general control architecture for ultra-low complexity robotic swarms that can be fully implemented in analog hardware and does not require dig- ital communication for any part of the swarm coordination. We demonstrate the versatil- ity and effectiveness of the proposed mech- anisms both in simulations and on a robotic swarm platform for a variety of applications, ranging from area coverage, to target track- ing, target interception or target enclosure, to active exploration and target finding, among others. The proposed system is extremely simple, robust, and scales well. It allows for homogeneous and heterogeneous swarms and has been successfully applied in several phys- ical instantiations.
